Post by girfanatic501

Posted: 2/29/2008 2:52 PM

Post subject: Your first encounter with TAS?

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Aglar

Expert player (3584)

Joined: 11/9/2007
Posts: 375
Location: Varberg, Sweden

Hi everybody! Yesterday Bisqwit wrote how he incidentally ran into the world of TAS for the first time and I didn't belive my eyes since it was so similar to my way of "discovering" it that it's almost ridiculous. I now welcome the people here on TASvideos to share how it all began for them, i.e the first time you incidentally found yourself doing some tool-assisted recording without perhaps actually knowing that the thing you did was TAS, or if it just was via a video you saw. Shortly, here's my story: It was 6-7 years ago and I was playing Mega Man 2 on the grandpa emulator NESticle. I had about never played the game on console so when I tried Quick Man's level I really struggled to get past the beams that caused instant death - that's when I found use of the slowdown function for the first time. By using that it was no problem getting past that level and somehow the idea struck me that if I record as I play in slowmotion and then run the resulting movie in normal speed, it'll maybe look cool. I tried that and was amazed by the inhumanly fast shooting and how the run looked overall (of course it was a lousy joke compared to today's runs since you couldn't rerecord on NESticle). I never thought I was doing something special really, just one idea that resulted in another one turned out to be a TAS, which I found out some years later.

feos wrote:

Only Aglar can improve this now.

Posted: 2/29/2008 3:10 PM

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Dromiceius

Joined: 10/3/2005
Posts: 1332

For me, it was probably luck manipulating my way through FF1 in junior high. Ironically, I probably could have beaten Chaos with less effort, had I just leveled my party a little.

Posted: 2/29/2008 3:12 PM

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Mechuyael

Joined: 2/1/2007
Posts: 245
Location: Israel

My first attempt at doing something even resembling a TAS can be found here: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/4441/Mech-RMbtr.vbm I was trying to make a sort of demo to maybe pique someone's interest so that he'll make a real run. Edit: If it's just a question of when I first started using tools, well, I've been using save-states since I've started using emulators. It's the best thing ever. Of course, I also abused the hell out of it on the beams in Quick Man's stage. :) I've played that game so much and re-loaded that part so many times that in the end I could just complete it without any help.

Posted: 2/29/2008 3:30 PM
(Edited: 2/29/2008 4:30 PM)

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Ferret_Warlord

Skilled player (1404)

Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape

My first encounter with tool assistance was actually back on my family's 386. My brother had discovered that pressing Ctrl+Alt+Down would cut the speed of most games in half. We used that on Raptor: Call of the Shadows a lot. Ctrl+Alt+Up brought things back up to speed. As for emulators? I don't know, probably some basic luck manipulation in Nesticle or something. My first encounter with formal TAS'ing? Morimoto's Mario 3 movie.

A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.

Posted: 2/29/2008 3:37 PM

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moozooh

Senior Moderator

Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5770
Location: Away

5th paragraph down and on.

Warp wrote:

Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.

Posted: 2/29/2008 3:51 PM

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Shinryuu

Experienced player (538)

Joined: 5/12/2005
Posts: 707

I played most of the greatest SNES games about a 10-11 years back, i remember things that i wanted to do better, being luck manipulated in RPG games like Chrono Trigger, Tales of Phantasia, Seiken Densetsu and Final Fantasy game series. I usually speed-upped the game since i bored to the intros and skipped some speech parts. When i began to play Megaman X games with emulator i discovered and found it entertaining that i can use turbo-buttons and slowdown to make movements much cooler. After that i tried to search for emulators that supports some kind of (re)recording feature and so on. ...until in somewhere around a spring 2005 i saw Morimoto's, FinalFighter's Rockman2 movie, it inspired me so much that i contacted Bisqwit with my emails and i asked (spammed) how to do glitches in that game, and i began to do my own _real_ TASing attempts in Rockman2. So that's what i can call my real first experience of diving to the TASing world.

Posted: 2/29/2008 3:59 PM

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Cpadolf

Skilled player (1432)

Joined: 7/15/2007
Posts: 1468
Location: Sweden

The first time I did a TAS was several years ago when I was actively speedrunning Super Metroid, with the help of savestates but no slowdowns (I had not found that function on Zsnes at the time) I was able to beat the World record by a craptastic 1 minute. However at this time I did not even know the quick buttons for save and load so every time I had to do so I opened the menu of the emulator at did it from there, very uncomfortable. The first time I recorded something was a year or so later when I had found slowdown, but since Zsnes did not have a rerecord function I simply ended up making zmv's of single rooms and recording them with fraps and putting them together into a movie. So it still sucked. I did both these things before I saw mormitos SMB3 TAS (Which was the first TAS I saw though I did not know it at the time) Also I massively abused luck for just about every RPG I ever played on a emulator.

Agare Bagare Kopparslagare

Posted: 2/29/2008 4:06 PM

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Mechuyael

Joined: 2/1/2007
Posts: 245
Location: Israel

Heh, playing Front Mission III with save-states is fun, oddly enough... Especially when you consider the fact that every attack has a chance to stun or eject the enemy... Muahahaha. Yeah, I obviously don't play some games for the challenge.

Posted: 2/29/2008 4:46 PM
(Edited: 2/29/2008 5:13 PM)

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mmbossman

Experienced player (822)

Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong

I think the first TAS I ever saw was Super Mario 64, back in it's 16 star incarnation by spezzafer. I didn't wander onto the site until about 8 months later, I believe. EDIT: Ok, I guess this was supposed to be about using emulators to help play games without knowing about TASing in general. So in that case, I only used save states for Chrono Trigger.

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Posted: 2/29/2008 4:51 PM

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mr_roberts_z

Former player

Joined: 7/21/2006
Posts: 747
Location: Northern Hemisphere

Saw Morimoto on Ebaum. Saw Spezz on Google Video. Repeated until sufficient.

Super Mario 64 TASes and stuff.

Posted: 2/29/2008 5:08 PM

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Mechuyael

Joined: 2/1/2007
Posts: 245
Location: Israel

Well, this topic turned into something else... Anywho, the first TAS I've ever seen was a River City Ransom one. I think it was the last 1-player run made. Then I saw some of the Megaman ones and was hooked on the site ever since.

Posted: 2/29/2008 5:19 PM

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MUGG

Editor, Expert player (2315)

Joined: 5/15/2007
Posts: 3856
Location: Germany

The first TAS I've ever seen was Super Mario World in 10:30. I was just fascinated by how cool and fast they are and searched for more. When I wasn't able to find a TAS of Super Mario Land 2, one of my all time favourites I lurked in the forums and finally posted a message. Soon after, I got an emulator, a movie file and the ROM. I started the emulator, loaded the ROM and watched the movie file. Since the screen was too small I enlarged it. However it ran slower since then. I had my fun with trying out everything the emulator could offer shortly after. I actually even tried TASing the game (though, the outcome wasn't good of course). I find funny how I didn't know about the savegame feature till frame 40.000. I only used the "continue from here" function. Oh well...

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Posted: 2/29/2008 5:41 PM

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Aglar

Expert player (3584)

Joined: 11/9/2007
Posts: 375
Location: Varberg, Sweden

Dromiceius wrote:

For me, it was probably luck manipulating my way through FF1 in junior high.

Ok, if manipulating luck is all it takes for TASing - then maybe my FIRST TAS encounter was when I blew and knocked on my NES cartridges, manipulating them to work, lol

feos wrote:

Only Aglar can improve this now.

Posted: 2/29/2008 6:01 PM

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superjupi

Joined: 10/15/2007
Posts: 685

Outside of my intentionally bogging down my ancient desktop with visual effects to play Tetris Attack in slow motion, my first formal experience with a TAS was an AVI of an old Rockman 2 Famtasia run several years ago. It was sent to me by a friend on IRC, and at the time, we both believed we were watching someone with considerable skill playing in realtime. The next day, he said something along the lines of, "he programmed an emulator to run an input macro, it's not really him playing" and produced an archive with Famtasia and the movie file. A couple weeks later, Morimoto's SMB3 movies surfaced, and searching for more material, I found this site, and proceeded to lurk for a good three years or so before joining. I spent a lot of time working on SMW and Super Metroid myself, but gave up on Super Metroid when the physics manipulation got to be too ridiculous for me to have the patience to bother with, and perfectionist that I am, I never felt that anything I did with SMW was worthy of attention. To that end, I've just been content to enjoy the work of others, instead.

Kirby said so, so it must be true. ( >'.')>

Posted: 2/29/2008 6:09 PM

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Soulrivers

Former player

Joined: 12/27/2006
Posts: 532
Location: Göteborg, Sweden

I saw spezzafer on google video, clicked the link in the video description, and here we are. ;)

My published movies [03:45:05] <Naohiro19> Soulrivers: ... [03:45:19] <Soulrivers> ? [03:46:35] <Naohiro19> <Soulrivers> No! <Naohiro19> So? <Soulrivers> Yes! [03:46:48] <Naohiro19> joke

Posted: 3/1/2008 6:16 PM

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Titus_Kwok

Joined: 4/30/2006
Posts: 480
Location: the secret cow level

Way back in the days of the Atari, I discovered that in certain games, if you turned off a wireless controller while you were playing, weird things would happen. On any tank game on Combat, it would alternate between driving in a circle and shooting, and moving straight ahead at double speed. I learned how to use that to my advantage.

Posted: 3/1/2008 7:25 PM

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4matsy

Joined: 4/25/2004
Posts: 498

I watched some of the movies on High Level Challenge and was like "gee these Japanese guys are pretty good..." And then noticed what the emulators called "append record" and "re-record" and was like "Eh?...Oh hey, maybe you can use savestates while recording? That'd explain it...hey that's pretty awesome actually. :D" So I made a TAS of SMB1 in VirtuaNES 0.69 (which was the newest at the time...this was way back in 2002). Haven't made one since. XD (5:08...boy has that time come down since then. :p)

Posted: 3/1/2008 11:01 PM

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Dark_Cloud

Former player

Joined: 2/24/2007
Posts: 22

mmbossman wrote:

I think the first TAS I ever saw was Super Mario 64, back in it's 16 star incarnation by spezzafer.

MUGG wrote:

The first TAS I've ever seen was Super Mario World in 10:30.

Same for me... that was insane! Few years later I did discover that was TAS... My first attempt in TAS was... it was.. hmm... I don't remind! *facepalm* ...and my first done TAS was SNES' Sunset Riders. (maybe some day I'll re-do it) =P

Posted: 3/2/2008 12:42 AM

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IronSlayer

Joined: 5/30/2007
Posts: 324

The first and only time that I've had to TAS anything was Battletoads. That's it.

Posted: 3/2/2008 12:49 AM

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CtrlAltDestroy

Active player (325)

Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786

The first TAS I ever saw was Dragon Warrior, which was shown to me by GeminiSaint right after I started using emulators.

Posted: 3/2/2008 12:57 AM

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Dacicus

Editor, Player (67)

Joined: 6/22/2005
Posts: 1041

The first TAS I saw was probably Wizards & Warriors III by Ferret Warlord. I was planning to make a walkthrough for the game, and someone in an IRC channel I used to frequent linked to the TAS on this site. After spending some time figuring out how to watch the FCM, I was amazed by the shortcuts and boss fights. I joined the forum to ask Ferret Warlord and scubed for permission to include their findings in the planned walkthrough. I never finished the walkthrough; it turned into a document of possibly useful tricks for TASing the game. Around that time, I discovered the instant-death glitch for the final battle and used it to improve the then-published run.

Current Projects: TAS: Wizards & Warriors III.

Posted: 3/4/2008 12:32 AM

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RT-55J

Player (147)

Joined: 11/27/2004
Posts: 688
Location: WA State, USA

4matsy wrote:

(5:08...boy has that time come down since then. :p)

That's faster than the first 3 or 4 movies listed on the SMB obsoletion-chain, and a year older to boot.

Nach wrote:

I also used to wake up every morning, open my curtains, and see the twin towers. And then one day, wasn't able to anymore, I'll never forget that.

Posted: 3/5/2008 9:42 PM

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BigBoct

He/Him

Editor, Former player

Joined: 8/9/2007
Posts: 1692
Location: Tiffin/Republic, OH

I've been pseduo-TASing everything I play on emulator for a while (just savestate abuse); my first encounter with "competitive" TASing was when someone linked Nitsuja's 35:19 Sonic 3 and Knuckles movie on one of the GameFAQs social boards.

Previous Name: boct1584

Posted: 3/10/2008 8:25 PM

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EarthPhantomTS

Joined: 2/15/2008
Posts: 5
Location: The Black Tower

I'd have to say, my very first time being exposed to the world of TASing was when, in my sophmore year of high school, someone in my computer science class was showing off a movie of that infamous SMB3 in 11 minutes speedrun. Of course, my jaw was hanging on the ground that whole time, but I thought it was being played in real-time. A little while later, I was reading a video game magazine and saw mention of it in a "Good, Bad, and Ugly" column, as well as noticing they had it as "Bad". Wondering why, I read the blurb, and that's when I found out it was a TAS. I was annoyed at first, because I hadn't been told, but I more recently realized that where it initially was probably told people, but someone somewhere along the line didn't understand or didn't notice that it wasn't a realtime speedrun, causing me to not be able to find that out from the get go. As for my first time actually doing anything TAS related...well, I'd have to say it was using savestates in Super Demo World: The Legend Continues, or, if it can be counted (because this one's in the actual game, not a ROM w/ emulator functions), casting the Return spell in Final Fantasy V Advance to get the "rare" steal from some enemies in the Interdimensional Rift more easily. So, yeah, I'm pretty much the same as most people.

I am light, shadow, and dark. I am everywhere and nowhere. I am pure energy and full power. I have spent an eternity pondering the mysteries of the universe. And...I think I have an answer!